Pixar makes magical films – Toy Story, Up, Wall-E, Cars – so you might expect that it would be magical place to work. And yes, it seems to be every bit as employee-friendly as every other high tech enterprise in Silicon Valley you have ever read about (even though it is not located in Silicon Valley, but in Emeryville – also outside of San Francisco, but in another universe altogether apparently).
You know what I’m talking about – the carefully designed workspaces that encourage collaboration and serendipitous interactions, the mind-body solicitousness of the fitness center and outdoor sports areas, the “you could live your entire life here” cafes, bars, and eateries. But what I think is really remarkable about Pixar is this: employees really like each other.
When John Lasseter, Pixar’s CEO, describes how the Toy Story team “saved” the project when it was imperiled, he says, “’We went back to what we wanted, and that was: the characters liked each other. Because we liked each other.’” And this, according to Anthony Lane, one of The New Yorker’s film critics and the author of a Pixar profile story, is the essence of Pixar distilled in the message of Toy Story – “You got a friend in me.” At Pixar, friendship is cemented by intense devotion to craft that is married inextricably to technologies that continue to extend the possibilities for the special brand of enchantment that the company produces. Lane notes that friendship is often the most enduring form of human relationships He writes: “[friendship is]…that practical momentum, conservative in its emotions, but radical in its taste for adventure….”
But (I can imagine you thinking out loud) they are Pixar – a smallish company with highly skilled (PhD-techno nerd-graphic design-type) employees operating in a rarified atmosphere making animated movies. What does this have to do with anything other than a highly specialized corner of the entertainment industry? What indeed? To me, the idea of friendship – its practical momentum, conservative emotions and radical taste for adventure – is the energizing, forward-moving spirit that the corporate world says it wants and then crushes with a deadening, faint-hearted version that it calls “employee engagement.”
Just compare the two – would you rather be friends with the people you work with or engaged to the company you work for? (I know that you don’t really get engaged to a company, you are engaged with the work you do for the company, but just humor me a bit.) The whole construct of employee engagement seems devoid of feeling which is odd because it’s supposed to be about attachment. Just imagine, for a moment, if organizational life was built on friendship. If products and services were really all about making friends with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. If the strong bonds of friendship were what underpinned business decisions – a balancing of short and long term consequences, a desire to sustain relationships, trying to make something last beyond the ups and downs of the moment.
I believe that the nascent corporate social responsibility movement (another label that just kills all of the passion and power of what’s going on) at its most basic is an embodiment of friendship There is something in the air these days and it’s bigger than engagement.
Perhaps it’s a consequence of how quickly changes that once seemed to take more than one person’s lifetime to experience have now become observable well within the boundaries of one person’s lifetime. We might just well have come to a point in history when kicking the can down the road doesn’t really achieve the goal of palming problems off to another generation. It may be that we are going to have to dig in and be responsible for the world in which we live – whether we inherited it or we created it.
How observable? In an article discussing the US government’s investment in lithium battery production as part of a highly controversial US-style industrial policy (betting on certain industries having the potential to create jobs and economic leadership in the world economy), the unforeseen consequences of having outsourced industrial production to Asia in the 1960s is identified as one of the major contributing factors to our lagging position industrial technologies. The author quotes a seminal article by Pisano and Shih, two Harvard professors, who believe that globalization has had the unwitting effect of tearing apart the ecosystem that generates future innovation.
Pisano and Shih write that “…US corporations, by offshoring so much manufacturing work over the past few decades, have eroded our ability to raise living standards and curtailed the development of new high-technology industries.” When consumer products companies offshored production to Asia, the drive to improve battery technology migrated to that part of the world too, because that was where it was needed – for toys and then small electronic devices. Fast forward to 2010 and now the transportation industry (manufacturers of essentially large consumer electronic devices) needs this technology, but its locus is in Asia.
While no one is prescient enough to foresee how the arc of history will bend, if one takes a long view, it’s easy to see that caring for interlocking relationships in the present might serve to strengthen the foundation for future endeavors. And what else is friendship but relationships that we tend today with a view towards tomorrow?
If we want our organizations and our economic systems to have a better chance at withstanding the vicissitudes of time, perhaps friendship is the best template we have.
Sources:
- “The Fun Factory,” Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, May 16, 2011
- “Make or Break,” Jon Gertner, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 28, 2011
